Do you recall the good old days, when blogging first hit the internet, and Blogger.com was all the rage? It was fairly easy for people to get top rankings back then, initially, but now it is really difficult to be seen anywhere near the top. What about blog and ping, does it really help to get you indexed faster? How many sites using this method have stayed alive for more than 6 months?. Here are a couple mistakes you should avoid concerning duplicate content, if you want top ranking.
Template Duplication
Think about this…if there are millions of bloggers out there with the same template, how does that affect ranking? Let’s say you are using Wordpress.org for your templates, are there others out there using that same Wordpress template? If there are millions of people with the same template website, isn’t that ultimately duplicate content?.
We all know Google HATES duplicate content, and this includes duplicate templates. Making your template unique may be something worth putting some time and effort into, if you want to find yourself in the top 10 pages of Google. One thing that has always remained consistent… give google what they want and you WILL reap the rewards.
Jumping On The Latest Craze
When each new fad, latest tool or software first comes out…everyone is rushing out to get their piece of the pie. Not long down the road everyone is using it and once again the duplication factor comes into play.Of course, when this happens, Google has to take a stand…then everyone is looking for the next big thing.
While many are focused on the craze for high ranking, trying out the latest new strategy or tool, it might be smarter to avoid all those tactics and stick to the basic foundation. Instead focus everyday on doing what you do better than the others.
Rule of Thumb
Stick with the basic foundations and reap the benefits long term. It really is pretty simple to benefit long term if you just do what Google wants. While Google may seem like they are out to get you at times, their main goal is to give the searcher a good experience. This should also be your goal.
If you are truly giving your members what they want, putting their needs above all else, and basing your business on how you can best meet their needs, success will follow.
To sum things up, next big craze, fad, tool or software that comes around, be aware of the duplicate content rule, and by all means, do not use duplicate templates. Stick to the basic foundations and strive to do better everyday than the masses. This will ensure you have a strong foundation, so you can reap the benefits for years to come.
Note: This a guest post from Veronica Routtu
“Success Begins When You Take The First Step”
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October 21st, 2007 at 7:10 am
I agree on principle that duplicate content is a bad thing in general and that you want your website but I don’t see how the specific points you’ve raised here would actually be marked as duplicate content in Google.
Templates for example are largely CSS, which is usually in a separate CSS file.
Talking about the latest thing, well as long as you talk about it in your own voice, it’s still a unique piece of content.
October 21st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
When the search engine spiders are crawling your website, what they see for template is something like this:
“Theme Name: Redie 3.0
Theme URI: http://www.pragyawebsol.com/
Download URL: http://www.va4business.com/free-themes/redie1.zip
Description: A theme created by PragyaWebSol.
Author: Steve Arun
Author URI: http://www.va4busines.com/”
Then it continues on to list the style of font, images, backgrounds, text size, alignments specifications etc…
If you use a free template as is, how many other sites out there are using that same free template as is? In which case the spider is reading that duplicate info across hundreds maybe thousands of sites on the internet with that same exact information.
If you tweak the free template to make it your own, the spider will not see it as exactly the same as all the other sites using that same template. While the basic outline, so to speak, is the same…it is not reading EXACTLY like the rest.
As you mentioned in your comment, it is using your own voice that is important, and makes it uniquely your own. This same principle applies even to the template.
While the general information may be the same, it won’t read exactly the same. This also applies to such things as submitting articles to directories. You don’t want to submit the exact same article to all directories, you instead want to tweak each article, using different format, wording, titles etc to have the most beneficial outcome.
I hope this helps to explain a bit more where the duplicate content rule comes in with regards to templates.
Sincere Regards,
Veronica Routtu
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:00 am
No, this is so completely wrong. Using a WP template that others are using has absolutely nothing to do with duplicate content at all. The lines you site are just code, and google does not care about the theme name, description, or author at all. When you state something like this you have to have something to back it up, and I’m certain you can’t find a single source anywhere on the web at all using same Wordpress Theme tied to duplicate content. If this were the case Matt Cutts wouldn’t mentioned it eons ago. A good example is in the article Just How is duplicate content defined, they state exactly the point I’m trying to make:
“It is generally agreed that attention is largely restricted to the main content of a web page rather than the structure of the web page. A large number of website owners use templates for their pages which define the structure of each page including things like menus, headers and footers. This is generally considered to be accepted and the search engines do not see this as being duplicate content. What the search engines are looking at is the actual content contained within the body of the page.”
Your second point “jumping on the latest craze” isn’t really a valid point either. Take for example “blogrush”. The code used to add it to your page(s) is javascript, and the googlebot completely ignores all javascript. So any ‘latest craze’ involving sidebar content, aff links, or ads would not be valid. If you were blogging on the same topic or point as anyone else, as long as it’s in your words you also have nothing to worry about.
October 23rd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
You may be correct on the code as I can’t seem to find again where I read that, so I may have misunderstood what I read!
However, I wrote this based on information I learned from an ebook I bought which discussed a free click formula based on SEO techniques. It was something I hadn’t considered before, which is why I thought I would share this info.
I did a google search and found some info on a site that is similar to what was discussed in the ebook. You can find that here:
http://www.articlemarketingnew.....ntent.html
There is a specific paragraph near the end of the article…
“Are templates in themselves bad??? NO! If so, that would mean that the thousands of webmasters that use Dreamweaver’s supplied templates or those from other programs like FrontPage or xSitePro would cause penalties and bannings. That does not happen. The danger is when you use a template and do NOT add your own unique stamp on them. A great way to do that is by using snippets and rotating them on the pages. Just make sure and make every effort to remove “footprints” such as text that may appear on may sites (like “put your links here”).”
As far as the “latest craze” goes, this is not so much meant as TALKING about the latest craze, as it is meaning jumping on the bandwagon to APPLY the latest fad. Many times the latest fad is only temporary versus if we just give google and our customers what they want, we benefit long term.
Hopefully the information from the link above will help clarify things a bit on the duplicate template issue.
Take Care,
Veronica
October 24th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
I didn’t think your code base matter either. Why would Google care how your code looks. Especially since a lot of these bloggers have multiple sites and there is a good chance their code is duplicated across them because they won’t want to switch to a different blog framework.
I don’t know for certain, but have a good quality site should come first before worrying about template stuff. If the template gives better quality then go with it. Avoiding duplicate content on multiple pages or by submitting too much too article directories is another story.